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What are some genuinely good places online?
With a lot of websites going down the shitter in an attempt to monetize (looking at you, Reddit), I'm wondering where some nice places are online. Nice whether in UI, the community, or really just in general. Below is a small list off the top of my head.
Tildes, because of high quality discussion.
Disroot. It's a slew of useful tools, available for free, while respecting privacy. Genuinely really useful, lots of utilities, good documentation, and a really nice community.
Wikipedia. It's Wikipedia, end of.
Mastodon. This one wholly depends on your instance, but on most(?) the people are nice, and the environment is a lot less argumentative.
Hacker News, high quality discussion over a fair few topics. Very active, too.
I'm honestly surprised that nobody has mentioned Reddit. It has a shit reputation here on Tildes, and I totally get it! There are good reasons for it, but as long as you stay away from the larger subs, people are genuinely nice 99.9% of the time.
Most of the LGBT+ subreddits are great places and unbelievably supportive. The communities for various health issues are also genuinely good and supportive - ones for physical as well as mental health issues.
I think its mostly due to the direction reddit has taken over the past couple of years in general. The large subreddits has always been a bit circle jerk in the first place. And yes, there are plenty of smaller subreddits that are amazing. I use reddit a lot for music interests and there are a few i use often to discover music, and share within.
I also want to add to the mental health topic. I have been active in r/bipolar for many years. That community helped me so much around the time of my diagnosis, bipolar disorder is so fucking complex and there is so much to learn when it comes to learning how to live with it, and understand it. We know so little about the brain after all. It used to be a great support group. But, as reddit has grown even that place has turned into a meme fiesta, and i barely use it at all anymore.
Even the support communities become overwhelmed with people just posting selfies which are upvoted far more than discussion topics and useful information.
Doesn't this mean the degradation in quality is more a factor of the size of the community? I'm currently observing many members of a sub I recently started moderating have the same gripes with their own community (which has gradually gone to 80k subs, but at an accelerating rate).
Personally, I think Tildes itself is a good example. I don't see anything within the underlying mechanics which would prevent a general degradation in the quality of discussion if it were to increase in size by significant factors.
https://docs.tildes.net/mechanics-future
Step 1 on reddit: unsub from everything.
Step 2: look for niche subs.
I'll share a list of some of my favorite smaller reddit places.
Man I'm really digging r/vintageobscura, thanks for the link.
There is an acre of incredible mixtapes made from the content in that place.
And their best of 2018 finds playlist.
These are excellent suggestions. Thank you!
Commenting specifically to say that /r/dndbehindthescreen is amazing for anyone playing any system of RPGs
The user there "famoushippopotamus" should at least be writing rules and adventures for RPGs full-time, if not creating his own system.
Also, @kavi, could you give a brief description of what Mastodon is about? I keep seeing it mentioned in different threads here on Tildes :)
EDIT: No longer on mobile, it'll stay the same though.
Mastodon is a federated alternative to Twitter. That means many sites host Mastodon instances - for different topics. Federation means you can communicate to anyone on any instance. However, I genuinely think the better part is the community at large. Mastodon is just perfect for having conversations with random people. It's also got a gorgeous UI - think Tweetdeck. And it's FOSS.
Try this instance picker to find one that suits your needs.
One of the reasons the community is good, is because as the instances are mostly rather small, the moderators per user -amount is ridiculously better than on Twitter for example. The software also provides great moderation tools and also many QoL improvements like content warnings.
Most instances are also very explicitly safe spaces, so the lgbt-community is really prominent. (That's something that's very unusual for such tech-originated community)
I am not updated on to why Discord should be distrusted, and i use it for all gaming communication since we all have our friends there as you mentioned.
My guess is that they gather a lot of data per usual. Any more information would be appreciated.
thanks, bookmarking it for later.
I'm sorry, my English isn't great and I don't get the second paragraph's meaning at all. Could you rephrase?
Thanks!
I agree with both not recommending Twitter. I don't think it'd be hard to persuade my friends to use Matrix over Discord, but there are still the other servers I'm in.
Reddit isn't too bad in certain areas - small subs tend to be a lot better than larger ones, and there are a few that have scaled really well (eg /r/casualconversation). Why is Hacker News hard to recommend?
https://duckduckgo.com/ - This search engine work just as well as Google, at least for me. And it does not gather any of your data. This is my go to search engine.
https://agoodmovietowatch.com/ - If you ever have a hard time deciding on what movie you want to watch, this is the best place i have found. It was pretty basic a few years ago and they have added changes over time that i agree with. Going through their "top list" is a good start. You get to experience film from all over the world using this site.
LOVE ddg. Even if I don't quite get the results I'm looking for, I just have to add
!gto the end and it takes me to google.Word of advice to people new to it-- keep your safesearch on moderate unless you are definitely looking for something that would be filtered out of image searches.
I'd say duckduckgo is on the cusp of being better than google - mostly due to google injecting ads into the results and their engine having a consumer/sales oriented ranking. Maybe it's just me, but google's relevance to my searches has been slipping the last two years. DDG isn't as good as google was, but neither is google anymore.
One of my major annoyances with Google lately is how badly it wants to "fix" all my queries for me. For example, I'm working on some monitoring stuff for Tildes right now, so I just did a search for "pyramid metrics tween". The first results were ones that it says don't include the word "metrics" because it decided that wasn't important, and I have to click on something to tell it that yes, I actually want it to do the search I asked for, and not one that's missing an essential word.
I use DDG as my main search engine, but I still try Google sometimes if I'm looking for more results. I need to get more used to always doing my Google searches via the
!vgbang in DDG to force it into "verbatim" mode.rateyourmusic is still a nice cozy place to give your input on music, see what others think, and find new things in the process. While there's some spillover from worse sites present on rym, for the most part you have to seek them out to land on them, and everyone else just wants to talk about music. More than any public place on the internet, I feel comfortable and at home on rym.
AniList is an alternative to MyAnimeList that has a bit more going on socially and I find it to be a pretty friendly space. Because it's a smaller alternative on a topic that isn't super general, even its global activity space is a worthwhile place to be. While I find this to be a great place with moderators who have their heads on straight, it's still an anime community and as such there will always be people walking the line of what I'm comfortable with, but it has good enough moderation + a decent enough block feature to make that negligible.
Really, the reason I care about these places is basically the same: There's a lot of sweet people who care a lot about what the sites are about. I'm so tired of the non-communities that build up on places like reddit and how they've all idealized not caring or being excited about anything, and these give me an escape.
That's why I made the post, to try and find actual communities. I'll take a look at rateyourmusic, it looks promising!
Going to the homepage of each site should illustrate this pretty well. MAL wants to be a database and recommendation hub more than anything else, so front and center are currently airing things, popular things, store shit, and other pretty dry content. There's some friend things when you're logged in, but it's still pretty light. The AniList frontpage is the inverse of that, with most of the screen being dedicated to either the global feed or the feed of your friends, and it's set up much more like a social experience than MAL is...it just feels tacked on in the case of MAL. I prefer the more social angle where you can't help but talk to strangers about things, and that combined with the security and downtime issues MAL had makes me hesitate to move back.
MAL is also a shell of its former self in terms of community, but the site just isn't designed with that in mind so it's not surprising that clubs and such are mostly dead. I get your complaints about modern design, but MAL does that as well and imo AniList pulls it off more tolerably and consistently.
Pluspora is a Diaspora pod inhabited largely by refugees from Google+, which is shutting down soon. I've long enjoyed the quality of content and discussion on Google+, and this has carried over to Pluspora.
Diaspora is a nonprofit, user-owned, distributed social network that is based upon the free Diaspora software. It consists of a group of independently owned nodes (called pods) which interoperate within a federated network, part of what is known as the Fediverse. You can operate your own node or join an existing one. Notably, Diaspora supports long-form posts, rather than being restricted to the shorter content length found on most micro-blogging platforms.
https://www.ecosia.org/ - this search engine plants a tree about every ~40 or so times you search for something. It uses bing I believe as a base search and I have got really decent results from it. The reason I use Ecosia is strangely not because I want to plant trees, but I dislike google. The trees are just a nice benefit.
https://www.habbo.com - okay, go ahead and laugh at me. If you've never heard of habbo hotel let me go ahead and explain it; it's a virtual "world" or hotel that you can chat with other people in. It is specifically focused on chatting, but you can build your own hotel rooms with furniture (some furni(ture) you can pay for, and some furni you can get for free by just playing the game). Habbo is a great place to chat with random people and friends alike. I find it really easy to find new people on here all the time to have small talk with.
http://www.sacred-texts.com/top.htm - yes, this website looks a little... err... antiquated and skeptic, but it's honestly the best place I've found to read old sacred texts from religions. This means all of the good stuff they cut out of the bible (apocrypha), islamic poetry (rumi), alchemical texts, and many many more! This is a MASSIVE index of FREE and AWESOME knowledge!!
Ecosia appears to be down. I also don't use Google because I dislike it, I just use DuckDuckGo instead, for privacy.
I'll check out habbo soon :)
I'm just going to go with the obvious one: Twitter! Fantastic people, fantastic amounts of activity, fantastic amounts of intelligence. As long as you use it correctly, it's one of the best places on the internet.
What are some accounts you'd recommend to follow?
It depends on the type of person you are. I, personally, am a pretty big fan of @polytrophic, @djmicrobeads, and when I'm feeling a bit silly, @snus_kin.
Of course, these aren't brand accounts and aren't even necessarily interesting accounts, they're just people I tend to enjoy talking to on the site.
For more "brand"-ish accounts, Chris Farren, without a doubt.
I've never actually signed up, but it's happened fairly often that I've been looking for opinions on something online and ended up at a thread on The Straight Dope. They've never steered me wrong.
https://discordapp.com/ - depends on the server but that's the same thing with reddit. Chat based discussion
https://dev.to/ - Developer focused blogging
I forgot about discord! I stick to inactive servers, IIRC I'm on the Tildes server, a speed running one and one with my mates in. I'll check out dev.to :)
I did not know about Disroot.
Thanks!
No worries :)